“Sometimes the voiceless have an enormous impact, so we have to give them a voice.”
So said Kate Larson, the historian who spoke on Sunday as part of the Summer Lyceum about Rosemary Kennedy, the oldest daughter of Joe and Rose Kennedy who was largely hidden during her lifetime, but whose influence demands remembering.
Larson is a leading historian on the lives of significant women, previously writing biographies of Harriot Tubman and Mary Surratt. She is developing a series of children’s books about Tubman as her next project.
“When we look at history through the lens of women,” she said, “that history looks very different.”
Her latest work is “Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter,” released in 2015. It recounts Kennedy’s tragic life as a mentally disabled member of the otherwise competative, overachieving Kennedy family, from the fabled “Camelot” years until her death.
Larson worked on the book from 2008 to 2014, speaking with Rosemary’s living neices and nephews as well as reading newly released family letters at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Reading letters by Rosemary to her parents gave her a voice, whereas until now people only knew what others had said about her.
Her parents were both ashamed of Rosemary, and sent her away for schooling and various camps, refusing to acknowledge her illness and keeping her from the press.
“I began to really see her as a real person,” Larson said. “She was by far the most beautiful of the Kennedy daughters, and she had been trained not to speak in public so people saw her as mysterious and coy.”
Larson even spoke of the experimental prefrontal lobotomy she received at her father’s order in her 20s, the lifelong disabilities it led to, and the positive outcomes of her tragedy.
Her siblings cared deeply for Rosemary and were affected by how poorly she was treated. Senator Ted Kennedy would become a champion of the Americans with Disabilities Act. President John Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act. Her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics. “They made sure that other people didn’t have to go through what Rosemary went through,” Larson said. The next Summer Lyceum event ill be Sunday, July 24, at the Unitarian Universalist Church.